Thursday, June 28, 2007

Unfairness doctrine   [Mark Steyn]

I’m all for monitoring media bias, but I’m not sure about the following:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to "Hardball." We're back at the "Hardball" plaza with the inimitable Ann Coulter.

(Applause)

MATTHEWS: And what deeply concerns me, more than the very existence of Ann Coulter, is the presence of many like-minded people here.

(Applause)

MATTHEWS: My God, is this "Deliverance"?

The chaps at Newsbusters weren’t happy about this:

The hypocrisy is staggering. On the same program in which he let Elizabeth Edwards berate Coulter for being uncivil in her jokes, Matthews jokingly smeared conservatives as characters from "Deliverance."

Obviously, for Matthews, civility is only a one-way street.

Oh, come on. First of all, it’s a gag, and on the whole I’m happy to let the Left be the po-faced guys who stand around saying “That’s not funny!” But secondly it’s a gag with a pedigree. In 1996, after one of his primary victories, Pitchfork Pat Buchanan warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them “like a character out of Deliverance.” In Deliverance, you’ll recall, some suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the country, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting tied to a tree and sodomized by a couple of stump-toothed mountain men. Pat, bless him, was identifying himself with the stump-toothed inbred psycho hillbilly – as a marketing strategy. Did he focus-group it? I’d love to think so. But the point is it’s a grand joke, and we shouldn’t be complaining about it.

06/28 07:40 AMShare