NewsBusters is known for its egregious double standards, and Noel Sheppard comes through again.
In a May 25 post, Sheppard whined that “Salon editor Joan Walsh took a truly disgusting cheap shot at the late Andrew Breitbart Friday” by noting that his successors at his eponymous website “have gotten lower than Andrew Breitbart” with their passive-aggressive birtherism in freaking out over a 20-year-old literary agency bio of Barack Obama. Sheppard never actually explained how Walsh’s remark was so insulting, but he freaked out anyway:
Does Walsh have absolutely no shame or respect for the dead?
Is nothing sacred when it comes to getting Barack Obama reelected?
With shills like Walsh appearing on this farce of a so-called news network, the answers are clearly “No” and “No!”
The next day, Sheppard touted how the right-wing website Twitchy (whose political leanings he failed to mention) “marvelously” reported that Walsh’s remark “sparked a new hashtag on Twitter.” He then begged his readers to visit Twitchy for more.
Meanwhile, Sheppard has remained silent about how one of Breitbart’s bloggers has gone after Walsh with references to oral sex that Sheppard might, if he was not a right-wing hack, call truly disgusting.
Media Matters reports that Breitbart blogger Dan Riehl tweeted, “I don’t mind Joan Walsh getting low, but if she’s going to open her mouth, wish she’d do something I might actually enjoy for once!” Riehl later tweeted: “I think I may have just discovered the most polite way of telling Joan Walsh to suck on this. lol”
Riehl used to be a NewsBusters blogger, so maybe that’s why Sheppard is afraid to call him out. Or perhaps Sheppard thinks it’s perfectly fine to hurl insulting sexual references as long as the victim is a liberal.
Either way, Sheppard’s double standard is painfully obvious, and it’s all too clear this is the kind of hackishness the MRC loves in its writers.