Media Research Center blogger Clay Waters devotes an Oct. 13 post to a big ol’ freakout over a New York Times column:
It was only a matter of time. A New York Times opinion piece attacked conservative opinion media outlets as prejudiced and cowardly (including a rising conservative star) while purportedly criticizing right-wing groupthink in “The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro,” posted Thursday.
Contributor Jane Coaston, a former MTV news writer who has recently penned liberal political essays for the New York Times Sunday magazine, smeared influential conservative writer and speaker Ben Shapiro (who has appeared in threatening environments when delivering talks on liberal college campuses) as cowardly for not challenging his fans’ awful right-wing opinions.
Keep in mind that Shapiro opposed Trump, which hardly ingratiates him to the people Coaston is considering.
The focus of Coaston’s column is Shapiro’s initial refusal to remove a racist Columbus Day video off his Daily Wire website until the bipartisan criticism grew too loud for him to ignore. Waters immediately rushed to Shapiro’s defense, declaring that “Shapiro had that video taken down and apologized for leaving it up on the Daily Wire as long as he had” and later complained, “Shapiro did everything he could after the Columbus Day video gaffe, but Coaston still roasted him.”
Well, no. Shapiro initially defended the video — something Waters ignores — because “conservatives are allowed to make satire, too.” It took another day for Shapiro to realize the controversy wasn’t going away; only then did he relent and have the video removed. That’s hardly doing “everything he could.”
Waters then went on a defensive tit-for-tat tirade against the column writer, first responding to Coaston’s criticism of conservative attacks on transgenders that require “denying scientific fact”:
The new official term is “gender dysphoria,” but until 2013, “gender identity disorder” was included in theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, in various editions), meaning the diagnosis was accepted in the authoritative manual of the psychiatric field until a few years ago.
She attacked one of Donald Trump’s campaign “falsehoods” that “America’s inner cities are hellholes and that black people have ‘nothing to lose’….”
Many liberals consider black life in America to be a racist hellhole, but when Trump says something similar it’s ludicrous?
Waters then deflected from Coaston’s point that conservative media are cowardly for failing to encourage debate on issues among its readers:
Actually, it takes far more courage for a conservative to speak on a left-wing campus than it does a liberal speaker to talk on a conservative campus, as shown by how then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders appeared at Liberty University without unleashing violent acts. To get to her unbalanced blame of the right, Coaston had to glide over the violence and property damage radical leftists like Antifa provoke on college campuses, not to mention the intolerance of conservative thought in general.
Sanders at Liberty University is not the best example Waters could have cited, since, first, Liberty refuses to permit the existence of a College Democrats chapter at the school and otherwise strictly controls the lives of its students; and second, Sanders was a token liberal chosen to dispel the (not unfounded) notion that the school only invites conservatives to speak. And third, Sanders’ appearance was in August 2015, well before politics got really ugly.
If Waters wants to see firsthand the monoculture of conservative thought the Times columnist was railing against, all he has to do is visit the MRC’s “news” division, CNSNews.com, which these days is largely Trump stenography.