Topic: NewsBusters
A June 16 NewsBusters post by Warner Todd Huston praises a Los Angeles Times op-ed by The New Republic's James Kirchick purporting to claim that President Bush "never lied to us about Iraq." Warner calls Kirchick a "lefty," and his headline describes Kirchick as a "liberal TNR editor."
Er, not so much.
Last August in a Boston Globe op-ed, Kirchick declared himself a "gay recovering leftist," pointed out that "most people knew me as "the gay conservative" for a column I wrote in the school paper," complained that liberals are "the most intolerant people I’ve ever met" (as opposed to him, "the supposedly closed-minded conservative") and asserted, "But there’s nothing about my homosexuality that dictates a belief about raising the minimum wage, withdrawing immediately from Iraq, and backing teachers’ unions: all liberal causes that I strongly oppose."
Huston began his post by stating, "James Kirchick, assistant editor of The New Republic, has come under NewsBusters scrutiny for his bias before, of course." Again, not so much; the only two other articles under Kirchick's tag at NewsBusters are by Mark Finkelstein -- the first incorrectly calls Kirchick "a blogger from the left," and the other, in the vein of Huston, praised Kirchick for writing in "the liberal New Republic" that the New York Times is "in the tank for Obama."
As Eric Alterman points out, The New Republic has supported the Iraq war, was once edited by conservative-leaning Andrew Sullivan and Michael Kelly, was formerly owned by conservative-leaning Martin Peretz and is currently owned by CanWest, a conservative-leaning Canadian publisher -- all things that make it less than the "liberal" publication Finkelstein would like you to believe it is.
UPDATE: George Zornick at Altercation points out the misleading claims Kirchick makes. Don't expect Huston to make note of this.
