Piling on versus covering up
Lots of Left nutbags have tried to hurl the Graeme Frost contretemps in our teeth, as if it justified their despicable lynching of Joe the Plumber. Here’s why it doesn’t:
Okay, but…Graeme Frost and Graeme Frost’s parents chose to become a spokesfamily for a particular piece of legislation, and to place their personal story in the service of the Democratic Party’s political agenda. Whereas all Joe Wurzelbacher did was ask a question on a rope line. Now, it seems like he enjoyed the ensuing attention – or at least initially he did – and it’s true that John McCain, not the prying media, was responsible for turning him into a national celebrity by citing him endlessly in the last debate. But if you’re talking about the vexed question of how much privacy the media should afford citizens whose life stories become political footballs, the Frosts and Wurzelbacher seem like at best imperfect equivalents: The S-Chip family asked for their celebrity to a far greater extent than Joe the Plumber did.
Chait embeds his argument in an attack on Michelle Malkin’s hypocrisy, since she led the charge to investigate the Frosts but posted an outraged attack on the media invasions of Wurzelbacher’s privacy. But citing Malkin throws into relief another difference between the cases. As Byron York noted last week, the only people who pounced on the Frosts were right-wing bloggers like Malkin; the mainstream media followed up later on, and covered the story as a case of a boy and his family being “attacked by conservative bloggers.” That’s not, to put it mildly, how outlets like the Times have pursued and framed the Wurzelbacher story. Now there are reasons for this difference apart from straightforward media bias: Frost’s age, for one thing, and the fact that a Presidential election produces much more of a feeding frenzy than a health care debate. But I doubt they’re much of a comfort to Joe the Plumber at the moment. And between this business and the bad-taste-in-your-mouth Cindy McCain “investigation,” it seems like a bad week for Clark Hoyt to come out with a thumbsucker on how wonderfully evenhanded and judicious his paper is.
A-yup. And to add even more bad-taste-in-the-mouth irony to the noisome stew, the only ones who will take note of what a profoundly stinking load of horseshit Hoyt’s lame, self-serving defense of his Clapped-Out Grey Whore will be — you guessed it — the Right blogosphere. Not a peep will we hear from the MSM on that, you betcher.
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