Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham is perhaps the chief Heatherer at the Media Research Center, taking to task anyone who dares deviate from right-wing dogma and branding them as insufficiently conservative.
So what does Graham do when a conservative calls out said Heathering? Why, he goes into Heathering mode, of course.
Conservative Bernard Goldberg has gotten tired of being bashed by conservatives who get offended when he "falls out of lock step" with right-wing ideology:
This is a letter to you, the conservative American ayatollahs who demand purity, just like the ones over there. I’m not talking about all of you, of course. But this open letter is for many of you; maybe even most of you – the ones who say you agree with what I write on this Web site and what I say on the O’Reilly Factor almost all of the time, but as soon as I fall out of lock step with you … you vow to never listen or read another word I say or write. You are the ayatollahs this letter is aimed at.
[...]
When I wrote about liberal bias while I was still a CBS News correspondent, conservatives applauded me. But some of my liberal CBS News colleagues called me a “traitor” because I didn’t toe the party line. They were afraid of dissent. Dissent would force them to consider another point of view, and that’s the last thing they wanted to do. Now I’m called a traitor again – this time by you conservative ayatollahs, for expressing a few opinions you don’t want to hear. Once again, you are what you condemn in liberals.
There is little difference between the authoritarians on the hard left and those of you ayatollahs on the hard right. You’re both closed-minded. You both demand ideological purity.
Graham used an Oct. 3 NewsBusters post to bash Goldberg, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's people like him Goldberg was calling out:
Former CBS News vet and O’Reilly Factor regular Bernard Goldberg is hopping mad at conservatives who’ve written him to tell him they will no longer watch him or read him. Goldberg even stooped to suggesting his critics “don’t want to even hear the other guy. You want the other guy dead (in some cases, I suspect, literally dead!)”
At what point does this kind of rage at the audience start hurting Fox’s ratings? Comparing American conservatives to Islamist Iranian dictators? He unleashed on them in a column called “An Open Letter to the Ayatollahs.”
Of course, Graham will never admit that he is one of those "ayatollahs" Goldberg is calling out -- if, indeed, he picked up on that at all.
