This is a short diary about one feature of this disaster that has continued to strike me, which shows yet another example of how the Mainstream Media has shifted far to the right.
There are two dominant pictures of Jared Lee Loughner going around.
One shows him with long curly hair and a maniacal expression, looking like a classic Dirty Farkin' Hippie. Here's an example: http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/... The headline to that article actually describes him as a "Left-Wing Pothead."
The other picture shows him looking like a clean-shaven, close-cropped member of Junior ROTC, or Young Americans for Freedom, or the Federalist Society. Here's an example: http://www.usatoday.com/... This good article from USA Today has many interesting details.
By the way, I've been reading thousands of diaries and comments on this, here and elsewhere, and I haven't seen anybody make this observation. Apologies if you already wrote about this and I missed it.
The point of this diary is that it's really creeping me out that the MSM is using the DFH picture about 99 percent of the time. I don't think I've seen the clean image on CNN even once.
On MSNBC this afternoon, I saw a show where they flashed the clean picture a couple of times, while leaving the DFH picture up constantly on the screen.
I think this shows an obvious, but perhaps largely unconscious, political bias.
Of course, it could be they just go for the Charles Manson picture because it is more sensational.
Incidentally, if you search on the Internet generally, both of those pictures seem to come up frequently (along with the Youtube video picture). Perhaps this disparity I'm noticing is mainly an artifact of TV.
But it damn sure reinforces the lying pushback from the wingnuts.
Thoughts?