My response to the Baltimore Sun’s false equivalency column
I’m posting this here for the simple reason that since the author gets to approve all comments on their site, I highly doubt it’ll see the light of day. Original article here.
Well, sir, aren’t you special? How amusing that you try to distinguish your false equivalency by “throwing a bone.” The difference between a Fox ideologue and one on MSNBC is that the ones on MSNBC put facts together. Beck, Hannity & O’Reilly create their own reality.
However, in a sign of how poorly the media has lost their way (this coming from someone who ran his college paper and WANTED to be a journalist before finding out what a shell it’d become), people like you feel duty-bound to create an equivalence between both sides, ignoring the facts of the situation, and maybe, just maybe “throw a bone” to one side once in a while, all in the name of fairness.
It’s fair to say that Olbermann has at times been a little over the top in his comments (and I will say outright that I am a fan of his). It’s fair to say that he may have overreached at times. But to compare his call for dirt on Beck and Ailes to the flat-out accusations of racism directed at the president by Beck, who has faced some horrendously virulent racism during the campaign and his term, is the worst of false equivalencies. You conflate passion with anger, racism with activism, and blatant hate-mongering with fury.
You are wrong, Mr. Zurawik, because you unfairly apply the same terms to two sides of the equation. Mr. Olbermann could be loud, angry, and sometimes over the top, but he never advocated violence. On the whole, he frequently called out those who advocated such violence and hate. He didn’t go after 78-year-old professors. He didn’t accuse people of trying to kill him. He didn’t make the wild, baseless accusations that Beck did, and when he said something, there was typically a good deal of facts to back up his statements. He didn’t twist history to his own purposes and invent massive right-wing conspiracies. And unlike Beck, he went after people on the left when it was merited, but his criticism, while passionate, often maintained a basic civility that Beck lacks.
So, go on, continue to spin your own balance. But just remember that “fair and balanced” is a Fox News term, and the truth isn’t always fair or balanced.
