Noel Sheppard expressed his annoyance in a May 23 NewsBusters post that Howard Dean said that right-wingers “hate Muslims, they hate gays, they hate immigrants.” Sheppard huffed: “Honestly, is this the kind of talk Comcast and General Electric should tolerate from someone on their payroll?
Sheppard might have a point if his fellow MRC employees weren’t busy living up to at least one of those characterizations.
Indeed, just an hour before Sheppard’s post went up, a NewsBusters post by Tim Graham was complaining that the Washington Post ran an article on a homeless shelter for gay and transgender youths.”You know you’re reading the liberal Washington Post when a story rejoices in the D.C. government offering ‘a measure of freedom she has never had’ to ‘slip on a flower-print blouse and shave her face,'” Graham snarked.
Graham went on to grouse that the article was “typically all sympathy and zero skepticism for the politically correct cause” and “all who fail to accept their moral choices are bad,” even complaining about “all the raging inaccuracy of pronouns — where the transgendered person in question gets to define which sex they are regardless of the biological realities.”
Is this not the exactly the kind of thing Dean was referring to? Or is Sheppard simply being nice to his fellow MRC employee by not holding him to the same standard he’s holding Dean?
Graham’s post wasn’t the only fit of gay-bashing the MRC was engaged in as Sheppard complained about Dean’s remarks. A May 24 TimesWatch post by Clay Waters complained there were too many New York Times article on gays:
So much for objective journalism; in recent weeks the Times has embraced gay advocacy. The May 16 front page carried a complimentary profile by Dan Barry (normally the “This Land” columnist for the paper) of Rick Welts, president of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, coming out as a gay man, “Going Public, N.B.A. Figure Sheds Shadow Life.”
[…]On May 8, reporter John Branch praised NHL “enforcer” Sean Avery of the New York Rangers under the headline “In Rarity, a Player Speaks Out for Gay Rights.”
Not such a rarity apparently, given that Branch followed up on May 14 with “Two Straight Athletes Combat Homophobia.”
The front of the May 17 Metro section was dominated by former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who resigned and outed himself in a memorable press conference in 2004: “Out of Politics and Closet, McGreevey Pursues Dream to Join Clergy.”
The trend culminated with the paper’s online multi-media feature “Coming Out,” datelined Monday. Sarah Kramer introduced it with a post “Gay Teenagers, in Their Own Words,” a placeholder for a selection of 30 stories from “L.G.B.T. youth,” with more to come. Kramer’s story was pure advocacy with not a dash of skepticism or disagreement.
Yeah, five gay-themed stories out of the hundreds the Times published over the time period Waters is complaining about is obviously too much.
No word on what Sheppard thinks about this.