Topic: NewsBusters
NewsBusters has been fretting that too much attention is being paid to a Regent University master's thesis written by Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, in which he supports numerous hard-right views, such as declaring working women and feminists "detrimental" to the family and the idea of married couples using contraception "illogical."
Scott Whitlock complained about the Washington Post's "frenzied attack" on McDonnell over the thesis, later expressing his dismay that the Post has done "nine articles in five days" on "a 20-year-old master’s thesis on the family structure." Noel Sheppard suggested that the Post is doing to McDonnell what it did to George Allen, the 2006 Virginia Republican senatorial candidate who got caught on tape calling a staffer for his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, the offensive name "macaca," which Sheppard dismissed as "a word he uttered that likely nobody in the nation had ever heard of prior to that point." Sheppard doesn't explain how the relative obscurity of an insult somehow makes it less offensive.
(As we've detailed, the MRC's Tim Graham got overly obsessed over this, and NewsBusters published false claims about the target of Allen's slur.)
But some college theses are more equal than others at NewsBusters. A June 18, 2008, post by Clay Waters appeared to complain that not enough attention was being given to Michelle Obama's undergraduate thesis, even though it is four years older than McDonnell's:
Has anyone except perhaps Hitchens and the Obama campaign read Michelle Obama's 225-page graduate thesis on race relations at Princeton in its entirety? The Times seems to be giving Michelle Obama the benefit of the doubt, even though her choice of topic bespeaks a bit of an obsession with race.
Funny, NewsBusters has yet to describe the subject of McDonnell's thesis as indicative of an "obsession" with feminists and fornicators.
