November 28, 2005 in Media, Media Orchard, Politics by Scott Baradell

So, Is This an Anti-Lesbian Media Conspiracy?

Day after day in the blogosphere, right-wing pundits are unearthing shocking evidence of liberal media bias — most recently, a poorly Photoshopped newspaper photo of Condoleezza Rice and a mysterious “X” that appeared over Dick Cheney’s face during a televised speech.

Now, you and I — as reasonable human beings of any political stripe — would probably assume these incidents were inadvertent errors or, at worst, the unendorsed actions of lone pranksters within the news organizations involved.

But you and I don’t see what the pundits see. They see the grand scheme. (Or at least, they see the tremendous Web traffic their conspiracy theories attract.)

As I pondered this trend in punditry, I came upon this item via CyberJournalist.net:

The (Danbury, Conn.) News-Times accidentally ran an offensive caption on its Web page under a photo of a girls’ high school soccer team.

The newspaper’s Web site published a photograph of the team after a championship-clinching win, but the caption said it was celebrating a teammate’s decision to “come out of the closet as a lesbian.”

The copy editor who wrote the caption was “goofing around” and didn’t realize the caption had gone online, editor Paul Steinmetz said.

Can you imagine how Michelle Malkin or Matt Drudge would have reacted if, instead of lesbians, the punchline of the editor’s prank had been fundamentalist Christians or another conservative constituency?

I enjoy political debate — particularly as it concerns the media. But could we please add some rationality to the equation?

Technorati tags: Journalism, Michelle Malkin, Media, Gays