Any regular readers of this blog, should they exist, know that I’m a big fan of Driftglass, who has spent years document bothsiderism and the attendant atrocities. It’s a shame that he isn’t aware of today’s New London Day, which has once again bent over backward to so far to be “fair and balanced” it has put its head up its ass, and not for the first time, though even Driftglass might have trouble doing justice to the latest Day atrocity.
If you have today’s rag, take a look at the editorial page (on which there are, by the way, no editorials). There are two political cartoons.
The first consists of three panels, the first two of which show Mark Twain saying “There are lies.. Damned Lies, and…” followed by a panel with a Greek column on which rests a stone with the words “Fox News” on it.
So far, so good. Recent revelations have proven what everyone with a brain has known for years: Fox trades in lies and half truths.
But the Day cannot stop there. After all, Both Sides (!) must be represented on its pages, even if by so doing the Day itself implicitly endorses lies and damned lies.
The second cartoon, the product of a right wing cartoonist that the Day uses for “balance” consists of an image of a television newscaster with the words “Conservative News” behind him. He is muzzled, his desk is swathed with ribbons reading “Speech Police Line, Do not cross”, and a document with the word “Blacklist” is stuck on the wall behind him.
Yes, the Day felt it necessary to counter truth with a lie in order to present both sides. The right wing cartoon is a classic Republican lie, accusing the other side of what they themselves are doing, for we can presume that the cartoon newsman from “Conservative News” would be fine with the book banning going on in red states, where only sanitized versions of American history may be propagandized and where teachers are being placed in criminal jeopardy should they dare to teach real history. One would be hard pressed to find an example of a politician on the left attempting to use the power of the state to prevent the free expression of ideas or historical truth.
Since this is an exercise in bothsiderism, could it be that we are to infer that the cartoonist responsible for this abomination believes Fox is being unfairly muzzled because it is being sued for consistently lying about Dominion voting machines? The Free speech clause has never, to date, been understood to exempt one who libels or slanders another from suffering the consequences in a civil action, but that’s something the right fails to understand, unless they’re bewailing their own alleged inability to sue someone on the left for slander. See, e.g., Trump mewling about changing libel laws so he can sue people for what they say about him, while he uses every trick in the book to duck responsibility for his own repeated libels and slanders. It is true that liberals have largely escaped being sued for libel, but that’s mostly because facts tend to have a liberal bias, so they don’t have to lie.
I have no hope that the Day will ever change. It used to be a good paper, but it lost its way when it caved to a bunch of right wing letter writers that accused it of liberal bias so it proceeded to make sure that the right had more exposure on its editorial page than anyone approaching the left, going so far as to give column space to a local right wing radio bloviator. No left wing local bloviator has ever been given similar space. After all, part of the both sides religion requires that one tilt to the right in order to prove that one treats both sides fairly. Do they contradict themselves? As Walt Whitman would say, “very well, the contradict themselves”. But that’s only to be expected.
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