The Media Research Center supports right-wing book bans, while pretending they aren’t really book bans when right-wingers do them. Tim Graham whined in a Feb. 7 post:
The top left corner of Monday’s New York Times tackled the “book bans” in Idaho and Iowa. “Culture Wars Put Librarians On Front Lines,” warned the headline. “Combating Book Bans and Threats of Jail.” Reporter Elizabeth Williamson began with how a “Rainbow Squad” of teenagers caused a ruckus at the library in Post Falls, Idaho. This went on for 2,600-plus words and the entirety of page A-16.
But wait – what about “book bans” or challenges from the Left? Are those not News, too? It turns out that Williamson had another story – this time from Maine, where the lefties tried to stop the “anti-trans” book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier. But that story was about 800 words….and didn’t make the paper.
[…]The obvious question: Why wouldn’t the Times take these two stories and merge them, instead of highlighting the anti-conservative narrative and burying the opposite “book ban” activists? This underlines how the Narrative is everything. The comparatively hidden fraction would upset the Times subscribers, so that can’t be front-page material.
Graham lashed at the book that was the target of the Idaho ban, “Gender Queer,” immediately hyping the book’s alleged salaciousness:
Naturally, Williamson and the Times chose to censor the actual disputed images and text. Their subhead was ‘What Is Explicit Is Subjective,” but this is how they summarized the book’s contents: “The author, who is nonbinary, explores puberty and sexual identity in the book, which includes some drawings of nudity and sexual scenarios.”
So they won’t show or describe Kobabe envisioning having her imaginary penis in mid-fellatio, as well as talk of masturbation and blow jobs. Conservatives are criticized for not even reading the “banned books,” but the Times sheltered their own readers from the explicit content. Aren’t leftists the open-minded ones?
Graham made sure to include links to images of said “sexual scenarios,” falsely suggesting that those couple of pages are representative of the content of the entire book (which we’re pretty sure he has never read). By contrast, Graham said nothing about the contents of “Irreversible Damage,” a right-wing anti-LGBT screed; as we’ve noted, a review of the book at Psychology Today pointed out that it advances right-wing anti-transgender narratives at the expense of actual science and pushes the false narrative that being transgender is a social contagion.
In other words, “Irreversible Damage” is being targeted because it’s an inaccurate work of hate and partisanship. Graham makes sure not to mention any of that.
Graham spent a Feb. 24 post raging at a news report on a teacher who makes available those books he denies are being banned:
Taxpayer-funded National “Public” Radio hates Republicans, and in red states like Texas, leftists become heroes for their “courage” in dangerous territory. On Wednesday’s Morning Edition, openly gay NPR arts reporter Neda Ulaby spent seven minutes touting how “A secret shelf of banned books thrives in a Texas school, under the nose of censors.”
On NPR, the “censors” are censored: there’s no opposing viewpoint on the “banned books.” And the heroic teacher and her queer students are all granted anonymity.
[…]The villain in this NPR story is Republican Matt Krause, who as a state legislator in 2021 made a list of 850 books he was questioning in Texas school libraries. He wouldn’t return comment, so apparently there was no one else in the vast state of Texas they could find to dissent from their orthodoxy.
Graham concluded by whining: “NPR wouldn’t feel this way if a teacher in California had several hundred Christian books and bibles and ‘anti-LGBTQ’ titles they were secretly sharing in a “dangerous” blue state, would they?” Graham does not demonstrate that any school board is banning anti-gay titles from libraries, nor did he explain why pro-LGBTQ titles must be banned from libraries.
Comedy cop Alex Christy played whataboutism when Jimmy Kimmel pointed out book bans in an April 24 post:
Tuesday was World Book Day and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel celebrated by bringing a quintet of librarians together to tell Republicans to “shut the [bleep] up” over their supposed book bans. The only problem was that the books Kimmel and his new friends highlighted, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird, are regularly targeted by race-obsessed progressives.
Kimmel began by declaring, “It’s also World Book Day today or as the state of Florida calls it, Bonfire Day.”
After a digression into the demise of the phone book and the Yellow Pages, Kimmel continued, “All jokes aside, this World Book Day is a weird one. There are at least 100 bills in various red states, three of which have become law already, threatening librarians with prison for the crime of lending books. Books that aren’t government-approved. Which to me, not only is this the opposite of what our country’s supposed to be about, it’s completely nuts. We’re going to throw librarians in jail for loaning out Huckleberry Finn. This is not what they signed up for. I think it’s disgusting and wrong and anti-American.”
Schools that target Huckleberry Finn generally do so under the guise that the book contains the N-word and therefore removing the book from the curriculum is needed “to protect the dignity of our students.”
[…]Like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird is targeted by blue school districts for its unsettling, but historically accurate language, while also being attacked for the alleged white savior complex of its protagonist. Meanwhile, Kimmel’s monologue and the corresponding skit from the librarians were just another case of Jimmy Kimmel Live! not sufficiently checking their facts.
Christy didn’t explain why these books shouldn’t be banned even as they arguably endorse racism, while books that don’t hate LGBTQ people must be banned.