Ross-ified

Yet another laughable Ross Douthat column coming in print in NYT tomorrow but just posted online.   Hitting media bias but along the way joins the ranks of rightwingers bashing the supposedly liberal media for ignoring the practices of a certain "abortion doctor"--even though the rightwing media and blogs also pretty much ignored it.  Enjoy the hypocrisy of Douthat, who often writes about the abortion issue himself, not once mentioning this case--until today.

“Leading the conversation” is how you end up with the major Sunday shows somehow neglecting to invite a single anti-amnesty politician on a weekend dominated by the immigration debate. It’s how you end up with officially nonideological anchors and journalists lecturing social conservatives for being out of step with modern values. And it’s how you end up with a press corps that went all-in for the supposed “war on women” having to be shamed and harassed — by two writers in particular, Kirsten Powers in USA Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion — into paying attention to the grisly case of a Philadelphia doctor whose methods of late-term abortion included snipping the spines of neonates after they were delivered.

As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.