I guess its out of some sort of misplaced nostalgia that I still sometimes listen to the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (New York City's NPR radio affiliate) - I say misplaced because 8 times out of ten the show does summersaults to covertly advance the causes of its corporate sponsors and bash progressives (some call NPR "Fox News Lite").
The show opened today with segments on the attempted assassination of Rep. Gifford - and the first guest was the supposedly 'objective' journalist Jonathan Alter, who advanced the false equivelence meme ('both sides are equally to blame"), using Daily Kos of an example of 'leftist hate speech'.
As you will see below, Alter makes only a half-assed, vague attempt to separate the individual diarist (Boy Blue, I presume) from the website itself.
On Leher's radio show, Alter said:
…...there's just hateful stuff that's said on talk radio all over the country every day - so part of the way this debate plays out will be whether the Right AND the Left you know, coming down on, uh, Daily Kos for instance which attacked Gabby Giffords and, uh, somebody on Daily Kos a couple of weeks ago said "She's Dead to me because she was going to vote for this tax compromise" and this kind of language CAN be tamped down if people are sensitive to it - that doesn't mean we need censorship...
I guess it goes without saying Alter said nothing about Boy Blue's later apology for his diary - maybe because there was no false equivalence to be drawn from, say, Sarah Palin apologizing for putting gun sites pointing at political enemies from her website.
I know that it has already been noted on this website that right-wingers have been using Boy Blue's diary to point fingers at Daily Kos, but think its worth pointing out when other supposedly 'objective' media figures pick up on it.
The full Brian Lehrer interview with Jonathan Alter can be heard HERE. The specific reference to Daily Kos begins approximately at 10:00.
Here is the description of Jonathan Alter from the Brian Leher show page linked above:
Jonathan Alter talks about the Arizona shootings and what this means for Washington. Alter is a correspondent for Newsweek, a columnist for Bloomberg News and The Daily Beast, an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One (now in paperback).