Topic: NewsBusters
Right-wing movie critic Christian Toto writes in a June 24 NewsBusters post:
The media's liberal bias keep getting worse in the Age of Trump.
The Motor City Madman has had a change of heart.
Ted Nugent said he wants the country’s political rhetoric to soften in the wake of the June 14 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise by a Bernie Sanders fan. And he’ll do his part by shelving his own ugly comments regarding the modern Left.
“At the tender age of 69, my wife has convinced me I just can’t use those harsh terms,” he said on the 77 WABC radio program Thursday. “I cannot and will not and I encourage even my friends, slash, enemies on the left, in the Democrat and liberal world, that we have got to be civil to each other.”
The media lapped it up. Outlet after outlet trumpeted the news, from smaller newspapers to the biggest media organs in the country. Type “Ted Nugent rhetoric” into Google News. You’ll see the blanket coverage his comments generated.
And, along the way, reporters recited some of Nugent’s previous, unexpurgated rants. They also mentioned Nugent’s politics. He’s unapologetically conservative.
Nugent’s conversion makes for good copy, no doubt. It also highlights the blaring hypocrisy at work in today’s media.
Toto spends the rest of his post complaining that the Hollywood press didn't cover controversial tweets by George Takei.
Well, as long as we're going to talk about hypocrisy, let's talk about Toto's own. He concedes Nugent's comments about "the modern Left" were "ugly" -- actually, they were borderline death threats against President Obama and Hillary Clinton -- but he doesn't reproduce them the way he served up screenshots of the Takei comments that offended him. Why?
Most of Nugent's offensive comments were made in 2008 and 2012. Where was Toto at the time? Was he quick to condemn them, did he condemn them later, or did he stay silent? A search of Toto's personal website, Hollywood in Toto, turns up just one post carrying a Ted Nugent tag -- and that this very same one he ported to NewsBusters.
And how about his Media Research Center publisher? Well, there are NewsBusters posts that promote Nugent interviews. The MRC's first reaction to the 2012 comments in which Nugent disgracefully called Obama a "subhuman mongrel" and invited him to "suck on my machine gun" was to play the equivocation game, whining that the media "ignored foul-mouthed comedian Bill Maher's $1 million donation to an Obama super PAC" and merely calling Nugent's hate-filled tirade "controversial." Another MRC post took equivocation even further by complaining that the media "failed to mention that Obama has his own history of using violent metaphors."
That was followed by the MRC uncritically posting a CBS interview with Nugent denying that he's extreme, except to grumble that "CBS made sure to emphasize that Nugent is not a moderate." A 2013 post cheered Nugent calling Michael Moore and Piers Morgan "subhuman punks."
It's not until Toto's post that the MRC has offered a judgment of Nugent's hate that went beyond the bland "controversial."
Toto won't write about that hypocrisy, though.
