Topic: NewsBusters
In a Nov. 13 NewsBusters post, Robert Bluey declared the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz "guilty" of "institutional bias against conservatives" for writing that "no mainstream outlet" published rumors regarding Sarah Palin's pregnancy "until the McCain campaign issued a statement, during the GOP convention, that Palin's teenage daughter Bristol was pregnant." Bluey adds:
I don't know what Kurtz considers a "mainstream outlet," but let's just assume we include the 151-year-old Atlantic, which Kurtz wrote about with great fanfare in August 2007. The magazine's most prominent contributor, Andrew Sullivan, was among the most rapid rumormongers about Trig Palin.
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Has Andrew Sullivan done so much damage to The Atlantic's journalistic standards that's it's no longer considered a "mainstream outlet"? Please tell us, Howie.
So, uh, tell us, Bob: How exactly is Sullivan and The Atlantic "mainstream"? The Atlantic has a fraction of the circulation of, say, that "mainstream media" stalwart Time magazine -- where, by the way, Sullivan used to blog. Since the Atlantic is smaller than Time, that means it's less "mainstream," does it not? And isn't Sullivan also less "mainstream" for moving from Time to the Atlantic?
Indeed, the Atlantic archive at NewsBusters contains a mere 17 items -- and none before January of this year, even though NewsBusters was founded in 2005 -- which tells us that Bluey's own colleagues don't consider it very "mainstream," either.
Yet Bluey "assume[d]" that The Atlantic is "mainstream." You know what they say about people who assume ...
